The Pain Nurse - страница 60

“Why?”

He shrugged. “By that time she’d broken it off with me. So I never found out.” It was said in the same flat, easy voice. He took a step toward her and Cheryl Beth retreated two steps. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

“What doctor are you talking about?” Cheryl Beth tried to draw him out, her gambit to see his handwriting having failed. Say “Chris,” she thought, just like the salutation on the note.

Mason gave a tight smile. “Just a small-town girl who likes to play games. By the way, I thought you had been instructed to not discuss Dr. Lustig’s murder with anyone: colleagues, patients, and absolutely not the press.”

With that, he turned and walked away, striding through the double doors and out into the hospital.

For days, Will had eyed the closet in the big rehab workout room with lust: it held walkers, crutches, four-footed canes and regular canes. He would walk again. He would make himself walk again, whatever noodles he now possessed in place of legs. This spinal cord, it was such a creation. His legs still had the same strong muscles that had existed before the tumor, before the surgery. But the signals couldn’t get through to them. Slowly, some were starting to come back. He did his usual walk up and down the wooden walkway, holding the parallel bars, as Amy guided him from the front and another physical therapist followed them with his wheelchair, in case he needed to suddenly sit. He wouldn’t consider such a defeat. His legs moved more easily, even if they still seemed almost detached from his torso. Amy held the multicolored gait belt she had cinched around his waist-he didn’t know how she could even slow his two hundred pounds if it started down, much less stop it, but the rules were the rules. Back and forth he walked, standing erect. It reminded him that he was a tall person.

Finally, after letting him rest, Amy unfolded a walker. It was scuffed and old, but it would do. They locked the wheels of his chair and he kicked back the footrests. She had him by the gait belt as he hoisted himself up and nearly fell. But then he was up, standing, holding the arms of the walker. “Easy…take your time…you’re doing great…” He heard the words and moved slowly, his mind focused solely on not falling. For those moments, he couldn’t stew about Judd Mason and the letter to Christine Lustig. Could he have been wrong all these years about Bud Chambers and the Slasher case? He couldn’t worry about Cheryl Beth, who might be in danger. He could only try to…walk. His body was now an awkward, dangerous contraption liable to go down at any second. Don’t fall…don’t fall…every brain impulse was focused on one command. But his feet moved. His legs pushed forward. He was using the walker. Five feet. Ten feet. Turn. He was grateful to ease himself back down into the seat of the wheelchair. Amy patted him on the shoulder.

“Great job today,” she said. “You’re just doing great.” When the other therapist left to deal with a different patient, she whispered. “Thank you for talking to me the other night. I feel better telling the truth.”

“I know.”

It was nearly three p.m. when he wheeled himself into the newest wing of the hospital and through the highly polished wooden doors that led to the administrative offices. Stan Berkowitz didn’t just have his own office, he also had a secretary, a petite young woman who seemed shocked to see a patient in a wheelchair in a hospital. She gave him the brush-off, but then he showed his badge and told her he and Stan were old friends. Her manner instantly changed from brusque to cooperative. The old cop who had broken Will in on the homicide detail had told him that a good detective rarely needed to show his badge, that he should be able to get answers just by the way he handled himself. It was true-real detectives didn’t flash badges with the repetition of their counterparts on television. But now Will needed any edge he could get. The woman reappeared and said Stan would be happy to see him.

Berkowitz didn’t look that way.